Is World of Warcraft Still the Premiere MMORPG?

As a whole the MMORPG has found a steady decline since the end of the noughties as the past decade has saw the rise of different gaming genres – esports has given rise to the MOBA and FPS genre and the huge successes found in mobile gaming combined have encouraged users to turn to online betting for these same games too as players can learn how to open an account on Ladbrokes for many of the biggest options – despite the changing in interests, MMORPG’s can still interest millions of players, but is World of Warcraft still up there as the premiere and most played MMORPG or has there been a shift?

Whilst it still ranks amongst the top particularly for players in the west, and the launches of older versions of the game including Classic WoW and WoW TBC have led to spikes in popularity, it’s safe to say that the game popularity has dwindled in recent years following some mixed expansion releases. Known for going through peaks and troughs with one good expansion followed by one poor expansion, a string of poor expansions one after the other haven’t helped with both Battle for Azeroth and Shadowlands not really meeting player expectations.



(Image from estnn.com)

There has been some growing interest particularly with the Player vs Environment side of the game with the Race to World First for the newest raids in each expansion, and with the MDI for organized dungeon play, it seems a little too late to really break into the esports side of the game particularly where the infrastructure to do so hadn’t measured up to what many of the other biggest games on the market have to offer. These poor expansion releases have also led to some of the biggest content creators in the game seek out alternatives in the MMORPG market, particularly with some of the biggest competitors like Final Fantasy XIV having been able to do the opposite with some very strong expansion releases showing where World of Warcraft had been falling short in recent years.

The latest controversy around Blizzard Entertainment may not help World of Warcraft either with expected delays to future content and expansion releases for the time being, and given Shadowlands has seen such a large drop in player numbers, these delays may only go to further harm the game in the future too – but the impact the game has had over the development of all others within the genre over the past two decades can’t be understated as WoW clones and games taking from the inspiration given will continue to be a huge feature of upcoming games, and set the benchmark for what a successful MMORPG title is.